Emigration and Imagination: Boston's Connection with Haiti

These manuscript fragments relate to a speech delivered by Phillips at the Cooper Union Institute in New York on 31 January 1860. Phillips proclaimed Toussaint one of history's great revolutionary heroes: "But fifty years hence, when truth gets a hearing, the muse of History will ... choose Washington as the bright, consummate flower of our earlier civilization, and John Brown the ripe fruit of our noonday, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, Toussaint L'Ouverture."